Free The Violent Bear It Away by Flannery O’Connor Page B

the schoolteacher and he did not mean to go to his house until daylight, when he could see behind and before him. “I ain’t going there until daylight,” he said suddenly to Meeks. “You needn’t to stop there because I ain’t getting out there.”
    Meeks leaned casually against the door of the car, driving with half his attention and giving the other half to Tarwater. “Son,” he said, “I’m not going to be a preacher to you. I’m not going to tell you not to lie. I ain’t going to tell you nothing impossible. All I’m going to tell you is this: don’t lie when you don’t have to. Else when you do have to, nobody’ll believe you. You don’t have to lie to me. I know exactly what you done.” A shaft of light plunged through the car window and he looked to the side and saw the white face beside him, staring up with soot-colored eyes.
    “How do you know?” the boy asked.
    Meeks smiled with pleasure. “Because I done the same thing myself once,” he said.
    Tarwater caught hold of the sleeve of the salesman’s coat and gave it a quick pull. “On the Day of Judgment,” he said, “me and you will rise and say we done it!”
    Meeks looked at him again with one eyebrow cocked at the same angle he wore his hat. “Will we?” he asked. Then he said, “What line you gonna get into, boy?”
    “What line?”
    “What you going to do? What kind of work?”
    “I know everything but the machines,” Tarwater said, sitting back again. “My great-uncle learnt me everything but first I have to find out how much of it is true.” They were entering the dilapidated outskirts of the city where wooden buildings leaned together and an occasional dim light lit up a faded sign advertising some remedy or other.
    “What line was your great-uncle in?” Meeks asked.
    “He was a prophet,” the boy said.
    “Is that right?” Meeks asked and his shoulders jumped several times as if they were going to leap over his head. “Who’d he prophesy to?”
    “To me,” Tarwater said. “Nobody else would listen to him and there wasn’t anybody else for me to listen to. He grabbed me away from this other uncle, my only blood connection now, so as to save me from running to doom.”
    “You were a captive audience,” Meeks said. “And now you’re coming to town to run to doom with the rest of us, huh?”
    The boy didn’t answer at once. Then he said in a guarded tone, “I ain’t said what I’m going to do.”
    “You ain’t sure about what all this great-uncle of yours told you, are you?” Meeks asked. “You figure he might have got aholt to some misinformation.”
    Tarwater looked away, out the window, at the brittle forms of the houses. He was holding both arms close to his sides as if he were cold. “I’ll find out,” he said.
    “Well how now?” Meeks asked.
    The dark city was unfolding on either side of them and they were approaching a low circle of light in the distance. “I mean to wait and see what happens,” he said after a moment.
    “And suppose nothing don’t happen?” Meeks asked.
    The circle of light became huge and they swung into the center of it and stopped. It was a gaping concrete mouth with two red gas pumps set in front of it and a small glass office toward the back. “I say suppose nothing don’t happen?” Meeks repeated.
    The boy looked at him darkly, remembering the silence after his great uncle’s death.
    “Well?” Meeks said.
    “Then I’ll make it happen,” he said. “I can act.”
    “Attaboy,” Meeks said. He opened the car door and put his leg out while he continued to observe his rider. Then he said, “Wait a minute. I got to call my girl.”
    A man was asleep in a chair tilted against the outside wall of the glass office and Meeks went inside without waking him up. For a minute Tarwater only craned his neck out the window. Then he got out and went to the office door to watch Meeks use the machine. It sat, small and black, in the center of a cluttered desk which Meeks